Hitchhiking the West coast in 1975. I had a touch of Lazarus Syndrome, having mostly recovered from Guillain Barre syndrome that winter. Female, 25, blonde, built, combination stupid/arrogant/innocent. Had a couple of scary rides, but got out of them unassaulted and with my backpack. Also collected some of the finest memories- climbing in Yosemite, the Bitterroots, the Tetons. Visiting good friends and relatives. After a month, went home and went back to work.
I was on an observation platform on the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, and looked across to the golden cross that marked the mountain’s summit. It was on a reef of stone that was separated from the platform by a ridge of snow and ice, of maybe 100 yards.
Every now and again, you have to hang your ass over the line, just to remind yourself that you’re still alive. I decided to climb to the summit.
So, I opened the gate on the observation platform and stepped out past the sign that read “Leaving safe area. Entering area of danger of life.” and on to the snow bridge. When I got out a bit, I looked to the left and realized that the snow bridge fell away to a drop of some thousand or so feet, onto rocks. On the right the drop was only five hundred feet, into a snowfield. Which was lined with rocks.
Did I mention I was wearing sneakers?
There were footprints in the snow that were deep enough to step into and cross in relative safety. However, on the way back, the guy in front of me, who was gripped out of his mind, slid across on his butt, very effectively wiping out the footprints and leaving a smooth - slippery, even - surface, over which I picked my way very carefully.
It’s too boring to remember, as I remember it (from last summer). You just, you know, go back the way you came, more or less.
I can’t believe some of the stupid stuff I did when I was a kid. When I was 16 my first car was a 13 year old little hatchback and I was driving myself and three other friends to the lake. We were on some random road where there was only one lane going in either direction and the car ahead of me wasn’t going that slow but slow enough to make me impatient, so I blindly without so much as looking shot over into the oncoming lane to pass them and a huge Semi was coming really fast towards us but I had already committed to attempting to pass the car in front of me and slammed down on the accelerator, we ended up making it before the Semi reached us but literally with only a second or so to spare. It was one of those situations where a split second delay and we could have ended up being one of those sad stories you hear on the news about four dead high school kids dying in a car accident.
I drive safer now, but I still drove pretty recklessly for years after that.
Were they hungry, hungry?
I went to Japan that way in the mid 90s. New degree, no job, no money, big debt? Go East, young man!
Gave a 10 minute talk about NASCAR in front of 300 people. 10 minute of sheer terror. Never done anything like that since. Who’s idea was it anyway to take a public speaking class?
Going over 50 MPH on a bicycle. Even hit 60 MPH once. Steep downhill roads. The last time the bicycle started to shake violently in something known as a ‘dead wobble’. Now I don’t go over 35 mph anymore.
I became an aircraft maintenance instructor in the military because I had a deep fear of public speaking. Talk about hitting a problem head-on! It eventually (mostly) cured me and I even taught college night classes.
Accompanying my brother on a parachuting holidays on the island of Texel in the Netherlands. He belonged to something called the British Military Parachuting Association and had jumped many times and was ex-Territorial Army.
I should have known better. None of your controllable modern square chutes here - old fashioned round military chutes with a hole on one edge for steering. Oh, and you had to pack your own chute after every jump - I guess the idea was to give you an incentive to be careful.
Beginners couldn’t jump in more than X m/sec of wind so there was a lot of bored sitting around drinking tea waiting for the wind to drop. I am sure my first jump was above whatever wind speed limit was in place as no sooner as I had semi-safely hit the landing ground I was dragged a high speed towards a drainage ditch pursued by ground crew who managed to hold onto me before I was potentially drowned. I still carry the interesting burn from gathered parachute cord being pulled out of my hand at high speed during my attempts to gather in my chute during that process.
More days of too much wind. You needed five marked jumps to get your “A”-license (wings) and we rookies were struck on one or two as we can to the last day. Perfect weather - so we started early and jumped like hell, with no break between landing, recovering, repacking a chute and lining up to take off again.
First jump was out of Cessna or something, the last four as part of a military stick running out of the door of an ancient Russian military biplane that held maybe sixteen parachutists. To add to our concerns of only having jumped once before you now had the added fun of watching out you didn’t accident steer into somebody else and collapse both your chutes.
I have never been so tired and frightened simultaneously. Fortunately it was not heights I was scared of, after the first jump anyway as I have done a fair bit of mountaineering and rock climbing, but the possibility of making a fatal mistake was at the front of my mind.
I got my wings and never went near a parachute ever again. If I was honest with myself I only went along as I was not going to let my older brother do something that I couldn’t do…
I’ve grown up since. Occasionally I put the video of my first jump on that was taken from the jump masters helmet camera plus footage from a wing camera, just to remind myself I did that sort of thing once.
Our mum just asked we were not both on the same plane or jumped together, sort of like the Royal Family I guess. In which case I was the “spare” I suppose…
Climbing Longs Peak in Colorado. One of the hardest hikes/scrambles your average person can do without climbing training. The last mile has very steep slopes and small ledges next to high cliffs, featuring a 20 foot section with a 4 inch ledge next to a several hundred foot drop. Thankfully, I took that section foot by foot since I almost slipped on some black ice halfway through. Technically that is a near accident, but it’s still the most dangerous thing I’ve done voluntarily (someone dies climbing Longs Peak every few years,) once you add the near-45 degree slopes with few handholds and/or filled with ready-to-slide rocks.
Joined the military. I’d never been out of Alaska other than to visit my grandmother in Portland when I was a kid. Getting to San Diego wasn’t the scary part; it was walking up to some guy in uniform at a military “help” desk in the SD airport and getting our asses reamed for, as I recall, pretty much everything that had ever gone wrong on the planet.
Not super-scary as things go, but I was pretty anxious going back into the ocean for the first time after being nailed by a stingray.
Getting down from the top of Half Dome when there’s a crowd of hikers coming up can be kind of scary.
Jumped off a few cornices on skis. Some bigger than others. Rode a motorcycle over a train tressle. It was much higher than I thought. Went all “Clint Eastwood” on some dudes who stole my motorcycle and recovered it.
I … don’t have a good answer for this question. That’s a little depressing.
I guess I could be all Meta and argue that living a life without a contribution to this thread is scary.
I hung a moon off the driver’s side running board of a transport truck at 100 km/hr. My co-pilot was steering, and cruise control was on. My coworkers in another truck snapped a picture and I was a hilarious legend at that company.
In the near 20 years since then, I’ve come to imagine all the ways that could’ve gone wrong and shudder at my foolishness.
I’ve gone skydiving twice, but I’m not sure that really counts for this thread since thousands of people do it and it’s a statistically safe activity.
Took a canoe out on Lake Michigan during very suboptimal conditions to see if I could help someone who was in trouble on the water. Sadly, I could not, and ended up needing rescue myself.
It probably does, because most people find it scary, even though (as you note) it’s actually rather safe.
My first jump seemed pretty scary, but subsequent ones much less so. After about 20, not at all.
The thing with hippos is not that they want to attack you (at least, not usually), it’s that they just don’t care. They want to go where they want to go, and if that happens to be where your boat is- well, your boat is basically a floating branch to a hippo.
Flipping over in a boat wouldn’t be that bad, except for the hungry crocs. You can’t even dip your hand in the river to cool off, as there is a very real risk of it getting nipped off. I think the estimate is there is a croc every 50 meters, and all are likely to attack any human in the water.
And then there was camping. Animals generally won’t attack a tent, but it’s quite thing to see the elephant, hippo and lion tracks through the camp in the morning.
Beautiful trip, but looking back I should have been a lot more scared.
96 mph on a motorcycle, non-straight desert highway. T-shirt, levis, sneakers. NO HELMET. I was 18, my brain was still larval.
(Once was enough, though. Got rid of the bike a month or two later.)